I am in the enviable position to set up a new system and
would like to ask everyone to suggest the currently best
components (not necessarily hyper expensive) incl hardware and software.

Following are the constraints :

Usage : Web , Database Server and Workstation
Webserver : expect abt 1000hits/day
Database : Interbase 6.01

Lan is ethernet with a 3com 10/100 officeconnect hub
the internet is adsl broadband via a planet xrt-101 cable router which does nat and there is a arescom netdsl-800 modem

We do some 3d graphics , but almost no gaming .

The system must be easy to maintain and should be able to
keep itself updated automatically with the latest patches or versions
for the installed programs.

Security is paramount

We need to be able to connect to this server from anywhere via
the internet as we travel a lot.

Other systems on the lan consist of 1x wk2 , 1x w98
and there are 2 idle machines , a micron P166 with a 2gb HD and a noname P200 mmx with 4gb HD which could be used for backup or whatever.

So what shall I buy ?

http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/Bro...html?cid=70636

The large one! Sorry, had to throw it in there.

If you really expect 1000+ hits a day, you may want to look into a better line than adsl. I run about 4 webservers off of an adsl line, all in the 500 hit count a day range, personal pages, webmail, that sort of thing, and the top end for adsl upload is 256k/s, that k-bits, or rougly 30Kilobytes per second, reallllll slow. The upload stream on adsl is pretty weak. You can look into RADSL (usually with Covad as the Telco) that comes in flavors up to about 1.1/1.1 or of course SDSL at 1.5/1.5, more or less a baby T-1, but until you start talking about T-1 level speeds as a back-end, any machine can hack that job.

Of my 4 machines, the fastest is either the Athy 700 with ATA66 drives or arguably the Ultra Sparc 5. The other two are Pentium 1's; all the slowdown is in the pipe.

I've got one friend running 100k hits a day off of a dualie PPro 180 and 9.1Gb SCSI-2 disks on an OC-12.

On to software. If Interbase runs on OpenBSD, which I highly doubt, you can't beat its 6 years with 1 hole in the remote install (the Linux distros go about a month or two between gaping holes, NT and the like have about 6 per day). Then again, you have to know a ton about UNIX before you even start to think of trying that.

RedHat and its up2date utility are pretty hard to beat. I would never let it touch the bootloader or the kernel, but aside from that its a pretty nifty toy.

Alternatively, Debian and its apt-get utility can be put on a cron-job to update as needed and with the switch to 3.0 (finally!!!), you might be able to get a lot of mileage out of them. Debian is above all... stable.

Lastly, Slackware. Automagic update of utilities isn't really an option, but in the past year Slack only had 20 security announcements or so due to Patrick's tendancy to leave out anything that may be a security issue to begin with. Subscribe to one mailing list, update the dangerous packages as needed, and there you go. 3 of 5 of the servers I run have Slack on them, and after that nearly everything else in my house. Slack, like OpenBSD, will take a little more UNIX knowledge to run.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the inputs so far.

Just for the record , interbase or firebird runs on windows,linux,solaris,
freebsd,hp-ux etc. The largest installation I saw was 250
clients connected to the server and given that you can download
it from http://www.ibphoenix.com for free it is ahem cheap.
We prefer interbase to mysql because of the available security
configurations possible and the super small footprint.

Keep the hardware suggestions coming ....

Cheers
Nux